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When the Garden Was Eden - Harvey Araton

PROLOGUE: IN A PARADISE LOST

LAST MAN OUT OF THE TUNNEL WAS WILLIS REED. The Captain emerged to a rousing ovation at Madison Square Garden and made his stiff-legged way toward his teammates waiting at center court. It was Wednesday night, February 23, 2010, halftime of a thoroughly ordinary Knicks-Bucks game except for the presence of the assembled legends. Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier, Reed’s fellow Knicks in the Hall of Fame, stepped out of the spotlight fringe on either side of the Walter A. Brown world championship trophy—a silver cup that takes more than one man to lift—while Dick Barnett and the beloved Minutemen Cazzie Russell and Mike Riordan applauded Reed as if he were coming to their rescue all over again.

This was, in fact, the 40th anniversary of the Knicks’ rise to the summit of pro basketball, and all the men at center court wore varsity jackets custom-made for the occasion: blue-and-white sleeves and 1970 stitched to the left shoulder. Four decades had passed since Here comes Willis!—since Reed, with a numbed and practically immobilized right leg, hit the Knicks’ first two shots before Frazier and the others followed his lead and buried the Lakers in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

And yet the celebration seemed tinged with sadness. Teri McGuire appeared for her husband, Dick, the venerable organizational lifer—player, coach, and scout—who had suffered an aortic aneurysm and died earlier that month. Eddie Donovan, the architect of the team fondly known in city basketball circles as the Old Knicks, had suffered a fatal stroke and was represented by his son Sean. Gail Holzman Papelian stood in memory of her father, Red, the wily and streetwise coach of both championship teams. The DeBusschere boys, Peter and Dennis, came for their father, Dave, dead seven years from a sudden heart attack in 2003.

But the legacy lives on. When Frazier stepped to the microphone, the fans in the lower bowl rose, shouting their approval, aiming their cell phones. The man they called Clyde conjured the memories that still, despite the years, abound and astound: I see the Captain coming through the tunnel, I see three of the greatest players ever to play the game—Baylor, West, and Chamberlain—mesmerized by his presence.

He paused for effect, letting the few fans old and lucky enough to have seen the looks on the faces of the Lakers for themselves linger for just a second longer in the reverie. I say to myself, ‘We got these guys.’

The disconnect of eras was starkly apparent, 37 years and counting since the Old Knicks had claimed the franchise’s second and last crown, in 1973. A new generation of fans, long suffering and paying staggering prices for an inferior product, constituted that night’s crowd.

In the second half, a team of young players and short-term rentals—filling roster space as the front office readied itself for the unprecedented 2010 free-agent sweepstakes, the Summer of LeBron—played miserably, falling far behind Milwaukee. There would be no glorious comeback, nothing even close to that storied game of November 11, 1972, when Reed, Frazier, and friends ran off the final 19 points to nip the Bucks right here at the Garden. But tonight, as the stands emptied before the end of the fourth quarter, so, too, did the guests of honor retreat from celebrity row, opposite the Knicks’ bench, with only Barnett resisting the urge to bail. Or, as he might have put it: fall back, baby. The man who had TRICKY DICK stitched into the right sleeve of his commemorative jacket remained in his seat until the final buzzer of the home team’s brutal showing. Sitting alone, Barnett watched through sleepy, expressionless eyes the young men coming off the court, players whose collective achievements pale in comparison with his own but whose individual salaries amount to more than Barnett had earned over his entire career.

It is what it is, he said philosophically, staring out at the deserted court as if it were a vandalized cathedral. And it’s still just a game.

But when the Captain and Clyde and the rest of the Old Knicks played, when the city and the country convulsed with fury and pain: oh, what a beautiful game it was.

PART I

ROOTS

1

DOWN HOME

IT WAS A HOT SUMMER NIGHT IN RUSTON, LOUISIANA. The air inside Chili’s, a bustling outlet just off I-20, was almost heavy enough to make breathing not worth the effort. The A/C system appeared to be waging the same losing battle as the makeup on the faces of several waitresses. But Willis Reed paid the wet heat no mind. He was much too tickled at tonight’s role reversal. Here, a few thousand miles south of Manhattan, Reed’s best buddy and oldest friend—Howard Brown—was the name brand, the guy with fans clamoring for his attention, the celebrity.

That’s what happens when you’re a teacher and you have a long career in the same area, said Reed, former NBA champion and national sports hero. You know everyone.

Reed and Brown, both age 67, live not far from here on adjacent properties near the Grambling State University campus where they once shared a dorm room.

Howard helped me get the land, Reed said.

Whenever Willis would come back to visit, he’d stay with me, Brown said from the seat across from mine. And about the time he was moving back, he said, ‘If you want to build a house, why not right here?’

The two might as well be brothers, and Reed calls them that. They met in the late 1950s at the all-black Westside High School, a few miles away from Bernice, a 30-minute drive north from Ruston. Willis and Howard both played on Westside High’s basketball team, Reed the star big man and Brown a 6'0" guard who, according to Reed, never met a shot he didn’t like.

Well, only until it came down to the wire, said Brown. Then Coach would say, ‘Get it inside’—which meant ‘Give it to Willis.’

Give it to Willis. A smirk grew across Brown’s face, and he looked across the table at Reed: Remember how Coach Stone would hold the bus for you?

Reed cackled at the memory, while Brown narrated:

We’d all be there, ready to go, except Willis. There was a guy named Duke who drove the bus, and he’d be looking at Coach, waiting for him to say, ‘Let’s go.’ But then Coach would stand up, put his hands in his pocket, and say, ‘I’ve got to go get my keys.’ He’d go back in the building and wait until he saw Willis walking up to the bus. Then he’d come back on and say, ‘Crank it up, Duke.’

And so the bus would roll with Reed on board, on the way to another all-black school, another audition for a young man destined for stardom in the heart of New York. But all of that had happened decades ago. It was ancient and unknown history to the Chili’s crowd, sweating over their fajitas.

The night manager stopped by our table while making her rounds to comment on my accent, which doesn’t sound too Louisianan.

He’s here to work on a book, Brown informed the perky young woman.

Really, she said. What’s it about?

This man right here and the basketball team he used to play for, Brown said. This is Willis Reed of the New York Knicks; his photo is on your wall.

He pointed to the entryway of the restaurant and there it was, along with other greats from this area, one uncommonly rich in basketball lore: Bill Russell, a native of Monroe, due east on I-20; Robert Parish, another Celtics Hall of Fame center, out of Shreveport, an hour away on the interstate in the other direction; Karl Malone, who put Ruston’s Louisiana Tech on the college basketball map; Orlando Woolridge, a cousin of Reed’s and a gifted kid who played for Digger Phelps at Notre Dame—on Reed’s recommendation—and later in the NBA; and, of course, Reed himself, who hilariously wasn’t good enough for most of the major universities up north that deigned at the beginning of the sixties to recruit a player or two from the growing pool of African Americans.

In the end, after a brief and uninspired flirtation with the University of Wisconsin and Loyola University of Chicago, Reed was more comfortable moving on down the road to Grambling, where he could play for Fred Hobdy, a protégé of the coaching legend Eddie Robinson, and stay connected with his best friend. Howard Brown might not have been cut out for college basketball, but Reed was more concerned about having a freshman roommate.

I bet my husband knows who you are, the night manager assured Reed. Then she asked for an autograph, which seemed like the polite thing to do.

IF WILLIS REED HAD INSTEAD RETIRED to a high-rise perch in Manhattan, maybe his fame would still precede him every time he stepped out the door. Whenever he got a hankering to aim his gun or cast his rod, he might have simply trekked upstate (just as he used to blow off practice—with Red Holzman’s permission—on opening day of hunting season).

In some ways, remaining in New York would have been the easier life. He would have spared himself the discomfort of climbing aboard prop jets designed for Lilliputians when flying out of small airports in Shreveport or Monroe, on his way to Montana to hunt or to New York City whenever the Knicks or the NBA called. But the perks of celebrity were never his guiding aim. What mattered to him was this: I just wanted some quiet, to be able to get in my car without worrying about traffic and being able to walk outside on my property and take a piss without worrying about my neighbors.

He knew himself well enough to know that he didn’t need strangers to remind him of who he’d once been. For Reed, basketball was about the competition, the wins, and, because he’s a practical man, the financial windfalls. Basketball was a life primarily defined by lessons gleaned from his parents and coaches—even from a few people he was once forbidden to so much as sit next to on the local bus.

If you’re going up to Bernice, Reed told me, then you’ve got to go see Harry Cook. We were sitting in the den of the modern home he had built in 1989, on the property scouted for him by Howard Brown. Here, in an otherwise bland rural expanse off the Grambling I-20 exit, the roadside dotted with tired wooden houses and a low-slung Baptist church, was where Reed envisioned and developed his gated dream palace on a rolling landscape with three specially designed ponds he stocked himself with fish.

Three Ponds Road: the retirement address of Willis Reed and his second wife, Gail.

Mounted on the walls of the den were his beloved hunting prizes—the stuffed heads of a bison and a mountain lion killed in Montana, a moose bagged in the Yukon, and an elk felled with his arrow, among other stuffed heads and … a basketball trophy, an MVP award.

Nodding, Reed added: Harry is a character, a great talker, and he can tell you everything about Bernice.

HARRY COOK IS A RETIRED BIOLOGIST who used to work for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. For years, Inell Reed, Willis’s mother, worked as a domestic for Cook’s family, among others. When Reed called Cook to tell him of my visit, Cook’s wife answered. Reed addressed her as Miss Alice, and, in keeping with the theme of country quaint, he told her he’d been meaning to drop by anyway because he and Gail were all out of Miss Alice’s delicious mayhaw jelly and they were craving a fresh jar. (Eventually, Cook would send me off with two—one for the Reeds, one for myself.)

Willis was a big boy, but Inell, she called the shots, Cook was quick to say as we settled down in his living room with glasses of fresh lemonade. She kept him on the straight and narrow. I’ve pretty much known Willis all his life. Yes, we were segregated in those days, but we all came up together, black and white. It was without conflict. When you’re living in a town with 1,500 people, everybody’s on a first-name basis.

Later, I asked Reed if he’d sent me to Cook, a white man, in part to dispel whatever preconceived notions that I, a lifelong New Yorker, might have had about the rural South—and by extension his childhood. The question made him chuckle. I always said that about Bernice—people did get along, he said. I mean, I knew there were things I didn’t have. Didn’t have the kind of houses the white folks had; didn’t have a car. The situation was what it was. But you know what? We all made the best of it in Bernice until it changed.

Founded in 1899 as a stop on Captain C. C. Henderson’s Arkansas Southern Railroad, Bernice was created to give Henderson an industrial foothold in an area known as the Big Woods, due to its huge virgin pines. In the days of Cook’s and Reed’s youth, the town, all of three square miles, was a thriving lumber-and-agricultural center, its two-light downtown a vibrant shopping district with a movie theater. Strategically placed were the warehouses—more than you would expect in a town that size, and owned by the man who employed most of Bernice’s working-class members, including Willis Reed Sr. and, for one unforgettable summer, his strapping teenage son.

Mr. Donald Lindsay, Reed said. "My dad worked for him, building the warehouses to store cotton for the government. I had a chance one summer to work at my dad’s job, the summer before my senior year in high school. So I was at these warehouses, with the scaffolding and all. Worked all summer in the heat for 75 cents an hour. Had these big old calluses on my hands and, man, that whole experience was life-changing for me.

After the summer, my dad said, ‘Well, you don’t have to go to college; you can stay here and work for Mr. Lindsay.’ Now, it wasn’t like today, where a kid who’s a basketball star is thinking he is going to play in the NBA someday. When I was in Bernice and even at Grambling, there were only maybe eight NBA teams. So what did I want to do? Well, after that summer working for Mr. Lindsay, I would see my dad coming home with sweat down to his knees, and, having been there with him, I knew why. And then I went back to school and there was Coach Stone, wearing a jacket and tie to school, nice car, much nicer house. So my real dream was about being a high school coach and a teacher like Coach Stone. I said, Boy, I want to be like him—I’m going to college.

He majored in physical education and minored in biology at historically black Grambling State. Beyond rooming with his friend, Reed had been drawn to a place where there were many role models like Coach Stone, and where his new mentor, Hobdy, would teach him not just the fundamentals of the game but how to cope with the degradations of the day.

He used to say to us, ‘Listen, you guys are athletes, and you don’t need to be out there demonstrating and all that,’ Reed said. The best thing you can do is do what you do best. Become as good a player and as good a team, and all of that is going to be a good example.

This was hardly black militancy, or even the kind of nonviolent protest that Martin Luther King was championing then, at the start of the civil rights movement. By nature, Reed was no iconoclast. At least not like his idol, Bill Russell, whose family fled Louisiana for the California Bay Area, settling in Oakland when he was 12. Reed wasn’t blind to the fact that there had been only one car, in the rear, in which he was allowed to ride on the train from Bernice to Ruston, and he knew why the white kids like Harry Cook could enjoy their burgers and fries in the real nice part of the café on Fourth Street while he and his black friends were relegated to the counter in the back. All these years later, a smirk creased his face when he said, Separate but equal, recounting the segregationist mantra that had prevented him from formally competing against white players until 1961, his freshman season at Grambling, in the NAIA basketball tournament.

What, then, could he—or any athlete—do for the Cause without involving himself directly in the struggle? He could win. He could show what black ballplayers brought to the court in direct competition with whites. Decades after the NAIA semifinals in Kansas City, where he had done exactly that, Reed could still summon the satisfaction of the tight game, his jumper on the baseline that gave Grambling a late 45–44 lead, and then the horror of watching a Westminster, Pennsylvania, shooter—the same one who had nipped Winston-Salem State in the Elite Eight—coming off a screen, wide-open for another buzzer beater.

I jumped out at him and he missed the shot, ball hit the front of the rim, Reed said. He himself had missed only one shot the entire game, free throws included. Grambling won the title by blowing out Georgetown of Kentucky in the final. For Reed, the execution of Hobdy’s strategy—social change via on-court performance—was another example of what had made Grambling the right choice for him. For me, as a kid growing up in the segregated South, certain things were probably not as tough as for other people in areas where they were integrated but more exposed to those hard feelings, he said.

He believed this based not only on his own experiences but on what he had observed in some black teammates and opponents from the northern states: a lingering bitterness that at times prevented them from putting aside the past and focusing on the tasks at hand. He had come to believe there were some unintended advantages to having grown up in a malevolent system set up by whites. As one historian, Jennifer Ritterhouse, author of a book about the social implications of Jim Crow, told me, Many people have argued that growing up black in the South was less segregated than your urban housing project in the North, which was so isolating, not only from the white world but from the middle-class black community that could separate itself from that environment.

Reed came to believe that separate but equal gave him one benefit that a young African American male living in an urban northern ghetto was not guaranteed: the proximity of the upwardly mobile black role model, the man in a suit with a college degree. With regard to race and class in 1960s America, perhaps that was the starkest antidote to a hard day’s work—sweat down to his knees—that represented the status quo.

I always said that Mr. Lindsay was very inspirational to me and he didn’t even know it, Reed said. When he referred to his father’s employer as Mister, he was not as much making a point about southern manners as showing respect to a man who had helped make Bernice a working town and something of a destination within Union Parish. However abhorrent the domestic hierarchies may have seemed to outsiders—especially northerners who never lived through Jim Crow—there was a personal history in these relationships that was complicated, lasting, and real.

To elaborate on this point, Reed told me about an invitation he’d received to speak at a Kiwanis Club luncheon from an insurance guy on June 25, 2009, a few weeks before my visit. As that happened to be his 67th birthday, he’d hedged, asking the guy to call him back at a later date, but he finally decided, What the heck? It was for a good civic cause. He put some notes together for a speech about his life as a young man and included his summer of hard labor working with his father for Lindsay.

I give the speech, and afterward this guy comes up, looks a little younger than me, had glasses on, a little pot belly, and says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ Reed recalled. I look at him, and I look closer at him, and I say, ‘Yeah, I do. You’re Robert Albritton. Donald Lindsay’s your uncle.’ He was amazed that I recognized him. He told me that he always remembered the time we went bullfrog hunting and I was paddling the boat on Mr. Lindsay’s pond and a big moccasin snake was laying up there by the side. I pulled over too close, almost got my head bit off. We laughed about that. He invited me over to see his mounts, said he’s got four alone of African game."

As a proud hunter himself, Reed said he might have to go have himself a look, if only because it would be the neighborly thing to do. And here was the essence of Willis Reed, a man who had long ago discovered that there was currency in overcoming differences, building bridges, and cultivating relationships.

That I—the writer of a story that had contributed to his being fired by the only organization he ever wanted to work for—was sitting in his den, still apparently welcome in his life, was a testament to that very fact.

IN APRIL 2007, REED RETIRED FROM BASKETBALL, concluding a four-year stay in the front office of the New Orleans Hornets. He had taken the job in part because he was bored with the ceremonial position he had with his bedraggled Knicks, but even more so to be closer to his ailing mother. Dutifully, Reed went home to his native state in July 2003. Mother and son, long the essence of mutual devotion, had those summer weeks in closer proximity before Inell Reed, almost 80, died that October. To Reed, it seemed that God’s plan had brought him home to see her to the end and finish his working days; but two years later, with a biblical vengeance, there came a hurricane named Katrina that—perhaps least among its consequences—forced a relocation of the Hornets to Oklahoma City.

Nearing 65 years in a life that conditioned him to believe that fate is more than a four-letter word, Reed decided to quit just as the Hornets were returning to New Orleans. I called him to do a tribute column in the New York Times, and of course it couldn’t be done without reminiscing about a certain May 1970 night, the most memorable of his long and hardworking life.

As for the most forgettable?

Well, he said, you can guess that one.

There was no retreating from the unsavory subject and from my role in what was another infamous walk by Reed, this time out of Madison Square Garden and into the chilly New York City night: when he was fired as coach of the Knicks only 14 games into his second season.

November 1978. I was 26 years old, the new beat reporter for the New York Post, not so far removed from a Staten Island housing project and from hero worship of the man and his team.

The Post at that time was an afternoon newspaper with a long tradition of cagey sportswriting, but was being remade by Rupert Murdoch into the country’s most sensational daily. Reed was beginning his second season as the Knicks’ head coach after replacing Red Holzman, maestro of the franchise’s only championships. He was learning on the job, mainly how to deal with players whose work ethic fell far short of his own. Reed made the playoffs as a rookie coach but the team began the 1978–79 season slowly; as they pulled into Seattle, the word was that David Sonny Werblin, the new Garden president, was eager to make a move.

More impresario than sports executive, best known for landing Joe Willie Namath and putting the Jets and the old American Football League into the ring with the establishment NFL, the nearly 70-year-old Sonny didn’t know a pick-and-roll from the first pick of the college draft. Neither did his friend Howard Cosell, but it was Cosell who apparently made perfect sense to Werblin when he whispered in his ear that Reed was no worthy coach and that Holzman, who had been relegated to a nominal position in the organization, never should have been replaced.

In Seattle, following an afternoon workout, I asked Reed if the rumors were hurting the young team. He nodded, wearily. It hurts our gate and it kills team spirit, he said. Either I’m in or out.

The last quote was incendiary, fast-tracked for the Post’s back page. But while I accepted my no-holds-barred Murdochian mission to search and disrupt, if not actually distort, I also had to consider Reed’s facial expression, his reasoned tone of voice. He seemed more bewildered—hurt, actually—by Werblin’s refusal to acknowledge what he had meant to the organization.

When I called Werblin the next day for a comment, I told him that Reed’s words amounted to more of a plea than an ultimatum, although the Post headline sitting on his desk had certainly read like the latter. Werblin said he understood the nature of the tabloid newspaper. Days later, when he fired Reed and replaced him with Holzman, Werblin confided to a member of the organization, Nobody gives me an ultimatum.

That story was my first big splash as the Knicks beat reporter, but it came fraught with conflicting emotions. No matter how much I reminded myself that I was just doing my job, the advancement of my young sportswriting career at the expense of the most essential Knick in the history of the franchise did not feel much like a triumph.

Through the years, Reed and I never talked about the story or its consequences. After he went across the Hudson River to work for the New Jersey Nets in 1988, he always returned my calls, greeting me at the arena with an outstretched hand. But I nevertheless wondered if there was resentment on some level, subliminal or not. Professionalism aside, it mattered to me on a deeper and more personal level. The space in my memory reserved for Willis Reed was more vast than what an occasional quote might fill.

You know what? Sonny had come in wanting to make changes, he said when I finished a rambling but sincere recounting of the in-or-out story, the call to Werblin included. He came in and fired other people, and he wanted to fire me. So if it didn’t happen that day, it would’ve happened the next week or the next month. So…

So the case was closed, finally and forever? Yes, he said, I shouldn’t give it another thought. I thanked him for his graciousness, for everything he’d given to New York. And when I asked what he was most looking forward to in retirement, he laughed and said, That’s easy. If you happen to call, my wife will tell you that I’ve gone fishing.

I hung up the phone and wondered why a man who had been the biggest fish and most important catch the Knicks had ever made would want to return to a pond in north-central Louisiana.

SURE ENOUGH, WHEN I WENT TO VISIT, HARRY COOK volunteered to show me around Bernice. We rode in his truck and made a quick stop at the Depot Museum, a two-room boxcar with artifacts from the town’s bustling sawmill era, a time when, as Cook noted, there were as many as 75 warehouses in operation. Inside, under glass, was a frayed copy of the book Willis Reed: The Knicks’ Take-Charge Man, by Larry Fox, who happened to have been the sports editor of the New York Daily News for a spell when I covered basketball there in the eighties. (You could damn near fill a library with Old Knicks tomes produced in the first half of the 1970s.) Folded neatly beneath the book was one of the seven Eastern Conference All-Star jerseys Reed wore during his ten-year career with the Knicks.

Cook drove to the end of Third Street, stopping in front of the gleaming one-story house Reed built for his mother, just a few hundred feet from the remains of the more ramshackle home he had inhabited as a child and where he had, on his own, built a backboard and rim. That was a proud day for Willis when his mother moved into that place, Cook said.

The next stop was the mayor’s office in the town hall on Fourth Street, in the heart of what was once a busy town center. On Saturdays, the streets were crowded with folks from here and the towns from all around us, Cook said. This street here, it had everything. You didn’t have to leave Bernice to get anything.

Now, with the sawmill industry long gone, with the remaining warehouses abandoned, Bernice was just another sleepy, depressed town. At one corner of Fourth Street were the remnants of a gas station. Several storefronts were shuttered; what remained open was hardly uplifting: Union Paper & Chemical, Professional Home Health Services, Rexall pharmacy. Across Highway 167 was the town’s lone fast-food emporium, a Sonic Drive-In.

Without the industry, Cook said, a slow, steady exodus of townsfolk had occurred in recent years. Bernice High—once the white school—was targeted for closure, with local students soon to be bused to a regional school in Farmerville, 17 miles away. Westside, the school Reed and Brown attended, sat empty and unkempt several miles north on 167. Even the two stoplights in town were gone, along with the welcome sign that once informed visitors that Bernice was THE HOME OF WILLIS REED.

Inside the town hall, Mayor Joe Hicks promised that the sign would soon be replaced by a new one, with a second one to be posted at the north end of town. Bernice was also planning a day in Reed’s honor, because, as Hicks said, Willis is still giving back to the community and to the church here, even though most people don’t know about it because he does it so quietly. All people here have to do is ask.

Hicks had left Bernice as a young man for work in Detroit, returning much later in life, presumably to retire. He wound up being elected Bernice’s first black mayor. Granted, it had taken a while for the historic event, about 35 years after the desegregation of the town’s schools. But Hicks said he was proud to have received biracial support. It couldn’t have just been the black vote, because in general, black folks don’t vote, he said.

Hicks and Cook said that any of the town’s old-timers, black or white, would tell you that all folks in Bernice could always agree on one thing, and that was their affection for Reed. Nothing united the town more back in the day than a Knicks playoff game against the Bullets, Celtics, or Lakers. I can tell you that my father didn’t care a thing about basketball, but if there was a Knicks playoff game on, he was in front of that TV and he didn’t move until the end of the game, Cook said. The whole town came to a standstill when Willis was playing. It wasn’t a black thing or a white thing…

It was a Bernice thing, Hicks added.

That’s right, Cook said. Everybody here felt good about Willis. You’d see him on TV, a star in New York, and then he’d be back in town and it was the same Willis we’d all known growing up.

The same Willis Reed who appeared during my last stop in Bernice—the Third Street home of his aunt Grace and her husband, the Reverend Clyde Oliver. Aunt Grace, his father’s sister, had been a teacher in the town’s black school system. The Reverend Oliver was the principal at Westside High School for part of Reed’s time there.

I remember when Junior—we all called him that—was playing in high school, everyone came out to see him, white folks, too, Aunt Grace said. As a boy, he was always all-out, never a problem for anybody. He always wanted to work, just like his mother and father, and he always loved money. He’d do anything to get that money: mow lawns, whatever.

When Reed arrived, in his fishing uniform, after a morning out on a lake in Farmerville with a friend, he asked me: Did the Reverend tell you that he coached basketball? No, I said, he hadn’t. But it turned out that Oliver had coached scholastically in the area, against Reed. Apparently, Reed never suffered for role models.

WHEN HE WAS A SENIOR AT GRAMBLING, Reed was offered an invitation to try out for a 1964 Olympic team for which he had surprisingly little interest in playing.

It was nothing political—or personal. He was just fatigued after a long senior season that was preceded by the Pan American Games the previous summer in São Paulo, Brazil. His body was still expanding, putting on natural weight. His knees were hurting. And with the ’64 Summer Games scheduled for October in Tokyo, any NBA draftee on that team would miss not only his first NBA days of training but also the opening game of his rookie season. Reed decided he wasn’t up for the sacrifice. More than a gold medal, he wanted the hardware that came with being named NBA Rookie of the Year.

With his attention focused on his future, he settled on the belief that he was going to be drafted by Detroit, which had sent Earl Lloyd, one of the league’s first African American players, to scout him in a game against Southern University and the future Chicago Bulls star Bob Love. I had about 40 that night, Reed said.

The Knicks looked at him, too, and a smile spread across Reed’s face when he recalled Red Holzman standing in the corner of the Grambling gym, raincoat draped over his arm, watching him arc soft southpaw jumpers and dominate the boards against an opponent long faded from memory. They shook hands afterward, but Holzman didn’t say much.

When word spread within Grambling that he wasn’t planning to try out for the Olympic team, Reed was called to the athletic office. Hobdy was waiting, along with Eddie Robinson, who was the athletic director as well as the football coach. The school president also weighed in. Their judgment was unanimous and firm: he had to go to the Olympic trials at St. John’s University in New York.

But I’m kind of banged up, Reed argued. I’m tired. I want to be ready for my rookie season.

He was told to put his school first, to recognize how rare it was for a player from a historically